[Image: Rehearsal photo of "Building a Buffalo" in solidarity with the water protectors and the Standing Rock Sioux, during a face off between demonstrators and police against the Dakota Access Pipeline.]

Building a Buffalo

devynnemory/beastproductions in collaboration with the dancers

Click button above to watch the performance.

This project birthed from a prompt that was discussed, written about and attempted in 3 meetings the week before Trump was elected President, and performed soon after the announcement on November 19, 2017 at a location that supports QTPOC artists. My usual practice of studio labor and granting cycles to squeeze my work into a format of production and product felt exhausted, and I wanted to approach this process as an offering to embodied dancers I felt kindred with during this heightened political moment. I invited 15 people into a space more akin to movement organizing than a rehearsal. We gathered in my home instead of a studio, sharing food and dialogue before demanding anything of our bodies. Together we discussed healing the ways in which embodied practices such as dance can be tokenizing and oppressing when we are asked to follow a director's vision of a pristine product; our bodies through their eyes. Together we heard one another and untangled the complications of being a “mixed body”. The kindred people I reached, responded to the commission:

To be mixed. To be female, except… To be a POC except... To be from here but not really, to be a dancer and also other, to be in agreement except not, to be in the light except private, to be one race and then another in a matter of seconds, to reclaim pattern and formalism from our people and reject the ways it was taught and formed into our bodies, to perform these selves, to make a ritual, to undo the rituals, to use what is passed down and also create something new- as a collective and separate. To put forward what we don't want others to put forward for us.

Instead of a cast we formed “crew”, each offering a variety of participation styles necessary to the outcome. We discussed how being a mixed body whether in race, gender, family of origin or idea pushed us into different areas of the performance world as we tried to mold our bodies into what a space is demanding of our cells. How our magical powers included adapting to any situation in order to get by. We discussed the subtle shifts that occur in us depending on which context or person we were in or with and how this structure we are building together can hold us if only for a slippery moment. We reclaimed our image by taking pictures of one another throughout the process, recalling the ways our image gets used to promote a show, often without consent. We discussed what it meant to be making anything at a time when fascism was once again continuing to reign. The ugly truths of economics and mis-gendering, pains of wanting to expose the darkness in the body, and competing desires of not allowing an audience to see these vulnerabilities- came into the room. We navigated our ancestry and rituals passed down, and cleared the space for these practices to land in the center next to one another. The tension of collisions and togetherness brought us to the studio for only one meeting where we build a score to exist in together. That night, a herd of buffalo descended on Standing Rock, in ally-ship with the water protectors were fighting for their ancestral land. The structure we built was performed for one night, a momentary stampede for whoever witnessed it that evening, before we were to all be infected with the oppressions we were trying to reclaim in our spirits together. A momentary ally-ship to one another, performing amongst one anothers’ in between spaces, and never to be seen again.